


Sidereal

by tealmoon



Category: Mother 1 | EarthBound Zero | EarthBound Beginnings, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Crossover, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Undertale, Stream of Consciousness, written for the Undertale anniversary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 06:32:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12102813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tealmoon/pseuds/tealmoon
Summary: There's a reason why Papyrus has that symbol on his battlebody.(Someone falls into the Underground, and it's not who you might expect.)





	Sidereal

**Author's Note:**

> http://earthbound.wikia.com/wiki/Starman

There is a monster in the Underground that is not a Monster.

It wasn’t so hard to stumble upon the wrong mountain, Ebott rather than Itoi, to become separated from the squadron, to fall. A soldier with a faulty navigational unit (why bother repairing a standard soldier at all?) was surely not missed. It tried to climb back out of the mountain, but there was a shimmering wall between it and the sky. It was trapped. Communications failed through the cage of the mountain, and who would bother sending a retrieval team for such an insignificant soldier?

It hoped its comrades were unharmed. It hoped its comrades had lived. It hoped the war against Earth was over, but there was no way to tell. It traveled along the caves, searching for an escape, only to find a civilization. A person, clearly not human due to her fur, her horns, found it. She offered tea it could not drink, touched its arm although its sensors had been turned down, so that it could no longer feel pain in battle. Her grief at seeing it soon became more understandable.

The people under the mountain are there because of a war against humans, merely a different one than the one it fought. A war long enough ago that it was only a memory, and most of its former soldiers no longer lived with weapons in hand. The people under the mountain do not try to attack; it is not a human, and it is trapped, just like them. The people tell it of their home, and the only choice is to stay.

It is led to Hotland, a place not so dissimilar to Mars. The memories are foggy, but the heat and the relentless red glow are enough to remind it of home, more and more each day. There are people made of flames, and small walking volcanoes, and yes, others made of metal and circuits, although none quite like it. Its technology is more complex than that of the monsters, and it offers its knowledge, first as currency, and then as friendship. There is a scientist who helps synthesize an oil that it can consume, as monster food would not fuel their system. In exchange, it gives her information and advice on inventions, none of them weapons. A lot of her talking is incomprehensible, but she is kind.

So many monsters are kind.

It gains a reputation as quiet but helpful. Monsters bring it bits of broken technology, primitive by its standards. A radio, a phone, a microwave. It repairs these things with the tools installed in its body, and sometimes it talks. Tell us about the stars, the monsters say. We’ve never met anyone from space before. Is it beautiful?

On the warships, space was not beautiful. Planets were attacked or drained of resources. Asteroids were harvested and destroyed. So many people were harmed. But it tries to tell them what the positive things it can recall from staring out of the barracks windows, watching stars and planets go by. The monsters are rapt with this, and some of them eventually arrive without broken machines in their hands, only interested in words. It has never talked so much in its life.

Years pass before it becomes a they. Traditionally, they are told that they also require a name, but one has yet to fit. A friend who they taught about the stars has since tried to parrot the information back as a moniker. Every meeting, it seems, there is a new attempt: Sirius. Cygnus. Alphard. What, don’t you like it? Doesn’t that sound out of this world? By now, they’ve learned to recognize those attempts at humor, flashing the lights in their visor as their little friend laughs.

Someday, there will be an appropriate name. Someday, their friend might get to see those stars that he is trying to name them after, as will his loud sibling, who visits with less frequency but far more volume, who proclaims that they look like an action hero, and the monster children, who play in the puddles while they search in the trash piles for scrap metal and trinkets that might appeal to their neighbors.

Others fall, with years and years between them: small humans, whose deaths would apparently set them free. They still have the files on their own human enemies, but they are fading farther and farther into their databases, until someday perhaps those names and faces are recycled out in favor of remembering the birthdays of their neighbors. Whenever monsters begin to whisper of a fallen human, they quietly close the door on their little home, barely larger than the barracks but warmer, both in temperature and in spirit, waiting for the human to pass. Perhaps it is cowardly, but they are not a soldier anymore. They have had enough of inherited wars.

They repair things. They learn the names of monsters, what they enjoy, what makes them weep. They do not starve. They mourn their fellow soldiers, both those who fell in battle and those who lived to escape Earth, to be sacrificed to another war somewhere else.

After years surrounded by monsters, their psionics resemble monster magic more closely, although they are still careful not to cause harm whenever they try to form bullets. After years, they have manifested a soul of their own: smaller, dark gray rather than white, more angular than the others but undeniably a soul. Perhaps it had always existed and only had a chance to show itself Underground.

-

"Don’t you want to be free?"

They already were.

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe it's strange to write something for Undertale's anniversary that isn't quite about Undertale, but both of them are really important to me, and this has a lot of personal meaning.


End file.
